PlusNet email goes adrift

Gaffe-prone ISP PlusNet has done it again - email services disappeared on Friday and customers are still struggling to get missing messages back.

The most recent problems began on Friday and they're not fixed yet. But at least the company hasn't actually deleted any emails this time - it just can't deliver them.

We received emails from several disgruntled PlusNet customers. One business user, who asked to stay anonymous, told the Reg: "2 weeks ago they had to delete millions of emails just to clear the queues on their mail servers. Last week everything that was sent between 10 and 3 in the afternoon on Friday (iirc) was lost. I am still picking up the pieces in my office this morning - who sent us emails and got 550s back? How do we know? Is this worth what we pay per month?"

We asked PlusNet to comment on these problems and on the claim that they removed one of their central pipes back in July. PlusNet sent us the following statement:

"Bounced email Problem: Problem with email configuration occurred on Friday at 11:15, problem fixed by 15:30 for 90% of customers and remaining done by 16.30. This followed a restore from back-up. Customers were informed of the problem and the subsequent resolution via our website service status tool http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1168015185.htm PlusNet would like to apologise for the inconvenience that this has caused.

Central pipe segments: In July we disabled two 155Mbps BT Central segments after migrating around 20,000 customers to Tiscali's wholesale LLU network which corresponds to a similar amount of bandwidth."®